In one sense, we’re all natural-born scientists. Give a toddler an egg, and sooner or later, they’ll drop it, just to see what happens — as life and Neil deGrasse Tyson remind us.
So why do we need to teach scientific experimentation, as the new proposed Science with Engineering Education (SEEd) Standards would have us do? And what’s up with the claim that the scientific method is counterintuitive?
I (nature, metaphorically speaking) give you an observation: a triplet sequence of numbers, “2-4-6.” You (the scientist) try to determine the general rule that underlies such triplet sequences.